Technology
What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal
It has been nearly a decade since hackers dumped huge amounts of personal data from Ashley Madison, the infamous dating site which, back in 2015, catered mostly to men who wanted to cheat on their wives. Now, that story is back in the media, partly because of a recent Netflix documentary about it.
You can see me in that series, a nerdy talking head in clips from various TV news shows from 2015, because I was one of the journalists breaking the story. But neither the Netflix series nor the handful of other documentaries still in the works get at what was truly revolutionary – and chilling – about the Ashley Madison affair.
Generally, the media has focused on the (mainly) men whose names and desires were taken from the company’s subscriber database and shared with the world. But that isn’t a new story. People have been trying to have affairs with strangers for thousands of years. Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads.
After a rebrand, Ashley Madison is now owned by Ruby Life and bills itself as a spicy dating site for married people. But back then, it marketed itself as a social networking site for men seeking affairs with women. In late 2015, a group calling itself Impact Team got angry at the site and hacked into its servers. The group grabbed a bunch of user data and code, then posted it on Reddit with the claim that 95 per cent of the people on the site were men. I was intrigued. How could all those men be having affairs, if there were virtually no women on the site?
With the help of two hackers and a database expert, I decided to find out. What I discovered was a bizarre scam – though it was far more like Westworld than US reality show Cheaters. The company had systematically created an army of fake women, mostly very simple chatbots called engagers, who would flirt with men to lure them into paying for a subscription to the site. As I wrote in 2015, “it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots”. Back then, I repeatedly contacted Avid Life Media for comment, but it wouldn’t reply.
As we pored over the code, we found that, although there were a few human women on the site, more than 11 million interactions logged in the database were between human men and female bots. And the men had to pay for every single message they sent. For most of their millions of users, Ashley Madison affairs were entirely a fantasy built out of threadbare chatbot pick-up lines like “how r u?” or “whats up?”
There were real women behind the curtain, though. We found company emails in the data dump and discovered that Avid Life Media was also paying a small number of workers to generate fake profiles for more than 70,000 engager bots.
One of these workers sued the company in 2013, arguing that she had been required to type up so many fake profiles that she permanently injured her wrists (the lawsuit was dropped in 2015). It gets weirder: we found an internal email where employees discussed a tool they had built called fraud-to-engager, which automatically converted fraudulent profiles from other Avid Life Media sites into Ashley Madison bot profiles. “Should tweak it and rename it,” one employee suggested.
At the time, I was shocked by the sheer number of fake women. I wrote: “Instead of looking at Ashley Madison as a dating site, I think it’s more accurate to call it an anti-community—a hugely popular social site where it’s impossible to be social, because the men can’t talk to each other, most of the women are fake, and the only interaction available is with credit card payments.”
Nine years later, this could describe any number of social media sites that have become swamped with bots and AI-generated absurdity – and charge you for the privilege of interacting with techno-phantoms. Currently, Facebook is trying to figure out how to deal with millions of fake images generated by AI, while Google’s AI bot Overviews is telling users to glue cheese to pizza. The problem is, human beings are interacting with these AI images and suggestions, in some cases imagining they are engaging with real people.
It is like the whole world has become the Ashley Madison of 2015, and the more we want to talk to each other about it, the less likely we are to find a human to talk to.
Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers, a brilliantly researched book about online disinformation.
What I’m listening to
404 Media’s weekly news podcast, showcasing investigations into the hidden depths of the online world.
What I’m working on
Eating biang biang noodles as much as possible on my book tour.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological warfare and the American mind. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
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The Vivo X200 puzzle is slowly coming together. Vivo confirmed the front and rear designs of the Vivo X200 recently, and now all three smartphones from the series have surfaced, in all color options.
The entire Vivo X200 series shows up online in all color options
The devices in question here are the Vivo X200, Vivo X200 Pro, and Vivo X200 Pro Mini. As expected, the three phones will look very similar. Designs of all three phones appeared on JD.com, one of China’s largest retailers.
If you check out the gallery below, you’ll get to see all three phones. You can see their backs and their sides here. All three models will have flat sides all around, which will be rounded slightly towards the edges. They will all have a circular camera island on the back, with ZEISS optics.
These designs lead us to believe that all three phones will have flat displays. We know that the Vivo X200 will, thanks to Vivo’s confirmation, but the other two will as well, almost certainly. The bezels will also be quite thin, though they may differ from one model to the next.
The Vivo X200 & Vivo X200 Pro Mini will have a similar camera layout
The Vivo X200 and Vivo X200 Pro Mini have a similar camera layout on the back. That layout does differ from what the Vivo X200 Pro offers so that phone will be easy to differentiate.
The Vivo X200 and Vivo X200 Pro will be available in the same color options. Moonlight Black, Moonlight White, Sapphire Blue, and Titanium colors are coming, as you can see.
The Vivo X200 Pro Mini, on the other hand, will be available in white, pink, green, and black colors. Vivo will likely use Moonlight Black and Moonlight White names here too, while we still don’t have official names for the pink and green models.
The Vivo X200 series will become official on October 14. That much has been confirmed by the company. These devices will launch in China, while there’s still no info regarding a global launch. They will be coming to more markets, though.
If you’ve been on the lookout for a killer deal on a perfectly decent tablet for streaming videos and catching up on some reading, hunt no more. Just ahead of the October edition of Prime Day, Amazon has , which is a discount of $65. This matches the tablet’s lowest price to date, which we saw .
The deal is for a model with 32GB of storage and ads on the lockscreen. Expanding the storage is easy enough thanks to the microSD slot, but to get rid of the lockscreen ads you’ll need to buy a different version (which, ).
Amazon
The base Fire HD 10 has dropped back down to its lowest price to date. You can snap up one of Amazon’s tablets for $75 ahead of the October edition of Prime Day.
You probably won’t be doing as much creative work on a Fire HD tablet as you might on an iPad Pro. But for kicking back and catching up on a show or reading a Kindle book, Amazon’s tablet certainly does the trick. It has a 10.1-inch Full HD display with a promise of up to 13 hours of battery life. Amazon says it delivers 25 percent faster performance than the previous model and it has 3GB of storage.
You can use the tablet to keep up with family and friends using messaging apps or hop on video calls with the help of the 5MP front-facing camera. You can also use a stylus to sketch in various apps. There’s Alexa integration as well, of course — you can use the tablet to control smart compatible home devices and get a live view of connected security cameras.
One thing worth noting is that Amazon has yet to hold its usual fall devices event, so it may be using the October Prime Day sale to get rid of its current inventory of devices on the cheap before announcing upgraded models. Even if Amazon does have new tablets to show off in the coming weeks, though, you’ll still have a solid device in hand if you snap this one up.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice in the lead up to October Prime Day 2024.
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U.S. asset manager Invesco has raised the value of its stake in Swiggy, ascribing an implied valuation of about $13.3 billion to the Indian food-delivery and quick-commerce startup that is on track to go public in about a month.
In a disclosure on Tuesday, Invesco’s Developing Markets Fund said it valued the 28,844 shares it owns in Swiggy at $219.25 million as of the end of July 2024. The asset manager bought the shares in Swiggy for $190.47 million.
Invesco invested in Swiggy in early 2022, leading a $700 million round in the Bengaluru-based startup. The round valued the company at $10.7 billion.
Invesco has been fairly conservative with its assessment of its holdings in Swiggy. When the market dipped in 2023, Invesco lowered its estimated value of Swiggy to $5.5 billion at the end of July 2023, and held it at about $12.3 billion at the end of April this year.
Firms use different methodologies to calculate the valuation of privately-held companies. Generally, they use the market performance of a publicly listed rival to benchmark such companies. Zomato, Swiggy’s chief rival, has had a market cap between $22 billion and $30 billion in recent months.
Baron, another investor in Swiggy (though it owns fewer shares in the food delivery startup than Invesco), valued the Indian firm at $15.1 billion at the end of March this year.
“Swiggy is well positioned to benefit from structural growth in online food delivery in India, in our view,” Baron said in a letter in June. “We believe India’s food delivery industry is still in its infancy and will continue to scale over the next several years thanks to a growing middle class, rising disposable income, higher smartphone penetration, and structural shifts in consumer preferences driven by a tech-savvy, younger population. The industry has also become a duopoly between Swiggy and Zomato, which bodes well for the future profitability and scale of the company.”
The mark up in valuation comes at a time when many investors have cut the value of their holdings in several Indian and overseas startups. In a June update to its investors, wealth and asset manager 360 One said it valued VerSe, an Indian startup that operates the popular news aggregator Dailyhunt, at $2.9 billion, down from the $5 billion price tag at which VerSe raised its last private round in April 2022.
#60 One ascribed a valuation of about $900 million to online meat and seafood retailer Licious, and $1.9 billion to edtech company upGrad, TechCrunch previously reported.
Swiggy is seeking to raise as much as $1.4 billion in the IPO at a valuation range of $13 billion to $15 billion.
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